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Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have na
by byyll 3y ago
Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.
- stemlord 3y agoI could understand so many employees for seemingly simple-ish tech services like this if 9000 of them are working in the customer support / tech support department. Wishful thinking though I guess.
- elAhmo 3y agoThey definitely don't need that many, hence the layoffs.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoAll of these hp tech start-ups/scale-ups overhired when money was cheap to signal growth and confidence to investors, even if they didn't need that many workers, nobody cared, as long as "line goes up".
- lupire 3y agoThis is nonsense. They hired people to grow users, usage revenue, not to brag about employee counts. Companies brag about maximizes revenue per employee.
- cbozeman 3y agoNo, that makes sense to you. I grew up with someone who is now in the C-Suite of one of America's largest corporations - a company that has been in the Fortune 100 for decades. He has bounced from directorship to C-Suite in Fortune 500s for the past 12 years, and I asked him about this phenomenon over cigars about six months ago, he said this: "cbozeman, you have to understand these people. Most of these people making these decisions are raging narcissists. What do you think sounds better? 'I managed and led 500 people.' 'I managed and led 5000 people.' And when you compound that on top of essentially free money, and then you also throw in the desire to lock up the best talent so your competitor can't have them, you have a recipe for indiscriminate hiring." This person has been working in a high-level capacity in the corporate world for over 15 years now. He has seen some truly reprehensible shit, and shared quite a bit of it with me when we meet up once a year for ice fishing. I can tell you right now, not only is not "nonsense", it's perfectly logical - just not to you, and not to a lot of other HN users, because entirely too many people think in the logic of 1s and 0s, and not in the logic of people. High-level business decision makers - the kind who make these decisions - don't think like you. They don't value what you value. They see engineers and programmers as expendable and easily replaceable - and many of them are. For every 10x or 100x engineer / programmer, there's 500,000 no-namers who can be slotted in and out without much trouble.
- ryloric 3y agoYou know, the older I get, the more the world seems upside down to me and I'm not even that fucking old.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThe world has always been upside down, you were just not looking to see it.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago> They see engineers and programmers as expendable and easily replaceable Most businesses see their employees as disposable commodities but at least Spotify, FANG and big-tech treat and pamper them way better than the rest.
- MisterKent 3y agoJust because you get massaged and fed beer, doesn't mean they don't think of you as cattle.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI was talking about pay not perks. How much do FAANG/big-tech workers earn vs everyone else in the industry. And maybe let's not victimize big-tech workers so much. Yeah, you have 17% chance of being laid off, but while you worked there you managed to save way more than people who work elsewhere. And everyone gets treated as cattle. But big tech workers get treated like those premium beef freerange cattle that get massages and fetch 200 dollars per kilo VS everyone else that gets treated like a slaughterhouse cattle.
- ergocoder 3y agowith 400K USD a year. A fully-fed generational wealth style cattle.
- 3y ago
- oblio 3y agoWell, this is another version of the classic "I could build this in an weekend" trope. 9500 is probably excessive, but think of it just this way: 1. Spotify has a worldwide presence, apparently 184 markets; that probably entails a legal presence in many of those jurisdictions, sales, marketing, support, localization, etc.; at a conservative 2 persons per market, just that's going to generate about 400 jobs; now, most of those markets will be grouped up but the big ones will probably have tens if not hundreds of people dedicated to that market (the US is likely to have hundreds of people supporting it, for example). 2. Spotify has to build, update, maintain, extend, etc a global infrastructure. Just the ops team for that has to cover 3x 8h shifts to make it 24/7. Each region should have at least 3 people in it, for high support availability. That's 9 people right there, and it would be crazy to support ~550 million active users with 9 people, they probably have 10 times that many people and teams supporting various components. So just an ops team of 100 is perfectly reasonable. 3. Then they need a dev team. They have... ads, various integrations, songs, audiobooks, podcasts, their apps or whatever are available on smart TVs, web, cars, bla bla bla, if it's 10 people for each client, that would probably mean at least 50 people. And 10 people per client is probably silly low, make that at least 100-200. 4. Then they have a bunch of backend services, probably a lot of them. Plop another 5-10 people for each service. That's going to be many more hundreds of people. 5. Then they have actual R&D, where they're exploring stuff. This depends on the company, but for a company that's still clarifying its business model, having 100 people researching stuff sounds reasonable. That's ~1500 people just from me eyeballing their business. 9500 is maybe on the high side, but considering their scale, if we dig deep enough into their business model, probably 5000 is perfectly fine. These services are crazy complex and "streaming mp3s" is a very reductive view.
- schnable 3y agoPlus it’s a two sided market - most of that needs to be created and operated for consumer and producer side, and all the systems linking them between.
- chillingeffect 3y agoA friend there says the labels - the producer side - are very demanding to work with. That could be draining resources.
- selfmodruntime 3y agoI'm wondering what it is that they're doing all day. The spotify app randomly changes, and if so, rarely for the better. I'd wager spotify could benefit from X' style layoffs.
- dieortin 3y agoWith “X’ style” meaning “handled in the worst possible way”?
- kranke155 3y agoThe X layoffs are too soon to make a judgement call on, look at the advertiser fight X is involved in now. Its up in the air if they kept enough people to make advertisers happy or moderation. Moderation has become a real problem on X, Ive sent reports that were clearly a problematic account, sometimes even fake accounts that are stealing identities, and the X UI sends me a message saying "nah all good"
- eps 3y agoThe advertiser fight is primarily caused by Musk's inane comments, not layoffs or the lack of moderation. They do contribute, but to a way lesser degree.
- kranke155 3y agoSo he didnt layoff part of the advertising team? It seems to me to be directly related to moderation, since its the usual "we dont want our ad to be near X" X being something advertisers steer clear of.
- CalRobert 3y agoIt hardly whips the llama's ass.
- zerr 3y agoOverhiring is the most important factor for manager promotions, unfortunately.
- candiddevmike 3y agoMore and more it seems they're an advertising company that also serves music and podcasts. I keep seeing sponsored recommendations and I'm a premium subscriber, for now.
- kibwen 3y agoSeemingly every company in the "tech" industry is just an advertising company shambling around in the rotten skin-suit of a legitimate business.
- camillomiller 3y agoNot Apple, IBM, Microsoft and many other that don’t make money as data merchants
- toymin 3y ago> Not Apple They're definitely moving in that direction https://searchads.apple.com/ https://searchads.apple.com/ > Microsoft It's not a huge part of their revenue but they definitely make a sizeable amount of money from ads
- mrweasel 3y agoMicrosoft is also actively trying to grow their ad revenue.
- robin_reala 3y agoMS made $12B in 2023 from advertising: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corporation-ad-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...
- mtmail 3y agoThat' only 6% of revenue (https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/ https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/)
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThe magic word is "growth". For context, I find this artist's explanation of the situation helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
- nemo44x 3y agoBecause managers that manage managers need more people to justify hiring more managers.
- tootie 3y agoI doubt even half their staff is product development. Acquiring and licensing content is very complicated. Marketing, advertising and operations. Their entire podcast stack includes not only end-user experience, they own multiple podcast production and analytics tools (via acquisition of Megaphone, Anchor, Chartable) not to mention their in-house production via stuff like Gimlet.